Sales and marketing, a phase that is used more often than practiced. However, when they are tightly integrated incredible value is unlocked. This week Mike and I talk about strategies to get your marketing team working closer with sales and harvesting some of the easiest revenue in your organization--sales sitting inside of your CRM system.

Speaker 1:

0:00

Make the logo bigger to create a customer for a lifetime is immensely valuable for you and creates a much better experience for those prospects and those visitors. Welcome to make the logo bigger opportunity to engage your current customers usually via email did you got to do it in such a way that they actually either, hey, look forward to the next email or don't unsubscribe.:

Speaker 2:

0:20

The podcast that takes you behind the scenes of a marketing agency,:

Speaker 1:

0:24

products and services and teams and the addressable market or the market that you're looking to kind of reach out to or target is constantly changing in a business:

Speaker 2:

0:33

from two guys that get paid to do this stuff on a daily basis.:

Speaker 1:

0:36

If you don't pay attention to, it's like the overall lifetime value of your clients, no matter what kind of business you're in and you're going to end up becoming like ultra it addicted to paid acquisition, which is really a negative thing. Here's your host though, right? For those of us who write or provide consultation and advice of any sort on a regular basis, there are so many little tiny tidbits that can be so valuable to our customers that we just don't get out into. The public domain is often and as easily as we should and like carol, there's no better lead than a referral lead the way that the Internet is working these days, whether it's facebook or whatever else. I mean more often than not, it's friends and people go out looking for recommendations, so like the happier and more engaged your current customers are obviously the more of an opportunity to get to turn them into an evangelist of some kind:

Speaker 2:

1:20

and now the obligatory legal disclosure. Blow Rice is the founder and CEO of Kalydeco, a marketing and design agency. Mike Carroll is the head of growth at nutshell, a crm software provider. All opinions expressed by bill are definitely the opinions of Kalydeco. All opinions expressed by Mike are his own opinions expressed by guests of this podcast could be right or wrong. Who knows? This podcast is for informational purposes and has a reasonable probability of making your marketing better. And now this week's episode:

Speaker 1:

1:52

are right. We are here with episode 17 of make the logo bigger and we're going to talk sales and marketing collaboration today. Um, I've got back with me and my co host, Mike Carroll. He's been busy, um, obviously with his new GIG and I've been on vacation so our schedules have been like a really hard to put together, but uh, but today we got it back together and so we're teaming up and this is like probably the perfect episode topic, uh, to have Mike back on board. So welcome Mike. How you doing? I'm good buddy. How are you going to be bad? Good. Good. I'm, I, I missed you on her vacation. We had an awesome time. You would've, you would've had a ball. So are you going to do anything? I asked for you to stuff in your suitcase and you politely declined. So are you. So you got anything planned? You got any big vacation? I mean, obviously you're starting a new things, so that probably makes it always difficult, but you got to need any. No, not yet. The summer. Uh, to be honest, actually I didn't get a chance to tell you this and I totally forgot. A stacy night are having another baby in January, so we're not going anywhere. Oh my gosh, that's awesome. Holy Cow.:

Speaker 3:

3:00

Packing them right on top of each other. We kind of did that at first. That's, that's, uh, the Irish twins. Yeah. That's awesome. So are you going to find out the sex this time? Are you just gonna know we can find out the sex. So it's a boy or he's a boy. Oh Man, I'm telling you. I kind of hoped for that. And so we had to go for a third and a fourth because we didn't, we ended up with two boys at first. So you got like the perfect pair. I think we'll be. We'll be done after this to two new carol's for the world is enough I think. Oh yeah. You guys are going to have your handful, but that's awesome. Super Cool. All right, so let's jump into this. I'm, that's Super Fun man. Congratulations. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, we can do it. Yeah. Well it's not ruined podcasts time whether we can talk about it later.:

Speaker 3:

3:40

I know, but that's, that's super cool. I'm so excited. Um. Alright. Um, although how many horses do you have now as we need to have kids to match horses? We have six horses on the property, only one of which is our own, but now I imagine at some point we'll have three of our own because I'm sure stacy want her own horse. Fiona will want her own horse. Uh, and then this young man has yet to be named. Will want his own horse at some point. So he'll, he'll, he'll have to break the wild mustang or something. That's a new thing. I think that would be what I would demand a just just so we're going to have a little bit of fun. Oh, that's awesome. I've got a friend at her, she's her daughter's big into it and I guess I don't know what the whole deal is, or the story she asked me to write a press release on.:

Speaker 3:

4:28

It's why I know, but I guess they're getting a wild mustang that they're actually going to break. So I don't know if that is that a thing, but that's definitely a thing. And if you, anybody is curious about this, by the way, the Netflix documentary unbranded is one of the coolest stories about wild mustangs ever. And so they, you know, they exist and you can adopt them, um, because they have to keep the population under reasonable control because they really don't have any natural predators or anything like that. But um, they're beautiful animals and the documentary basically follow these guys who decide to ride horses from Mexico to Canada, um, and they do it all on, on mustangs. Um, and that sounds like, you know, when you watch old West movies, you're like, oh, you just ride one horse. I'm like, well, no. Uh, when you're going that far 3000 miles on horseback, like yours is bound to trip or get lame or you know, those types of things.:

Speaker 3:

5:21

And so they actually had to have a, like a cohort of horses trailered alongside of them essentially, like within shouting distance, so to speak. And then they would have to switch in and out horses because they didn't want to hurt any of their horses. It's an amazing documentary. It's a really cool story. Oh Wow. I'll have to check that out. That's pretty cool. Yeah. She just reached out to me literally last night and so I thought that was interesting. So it's amazing that they're doing that by the way. That's definitely something that stacy is like wanted slash, you know, dreamed of doing for a long time. There's the, like the horses themselves are so cool. A very spirited obviously. Um, but the, the genetics, they're like great. Longevity, like over long distance.:

Speaker 1:

5:58

And then, um, actually they have like a reasonably nice demeanor, you know, once, once, once you've overcome the hurdle of the fact that they're not a wild horse anymore and they live with you on your, on your farm, but. Right, right. Super Cool. Okay. So let's, um, so let's jump into the sales and marketing. So one of the things, and I definitely, this is awesome to have you here and pull you into the conversation because obviously you have a lot more of these conversations about sales and automating things, but with our clients we've had more and more requests, um, and, and sort of things that we're doing that are kind of pushing us into what classically might be considered kind of the sales realm, but it's really deepening that collaboration between sales and marketing and really starting to define what marketing should be doing, uh, to help sales and slash or maybe what marketing just as a discipline is better at doing than the sales team.:

Speaker 1:

6:58

And, and there are ways that they can, they can help out and sort of kind of the big, big bucket of topics on this are usually around, uh, the difference between a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead. Um, and, but not a lot of people talk about what actually goes into or should go into, um, sort of making a, you know, one making it a marketing qualified lead. We talk about that a little bit, but then sort of the journey that it takes to becoming a sales qualified lead and what, if anything should be done there. So, um, so you want to lead with anything kind of top of mind about sales and marketing collaborating. Well, it's interesting. That's um, you know, at nutshell, like one of the things that we talk about a lot is, um, you know, when someone calls in and they're interested in using crm, um, we pride ourselves on, you know, at least at the very least becoming a resource for them to understand how to better leverage crm for themselves.:

Speaker 1:

7:54

Whether they choose nutshell or not. And obviously we have some pretty strong feelings on whether they should use it, but it's not for everybody and different crms have different strengths and so on and so forth. But one of the things that we talk about, you know, with some regularity is the makeup of the team that is actually in your crm. So I think the, like the conclusion that most people come to, it's like, well it's a sales tool, but that's not the, that's not the case. I'm not as, you know, I'm the head of growth at nutshell. So I run both sales and marketing. But as my role as sort of like chief marketer at nutshell, I spent a great deal of time in our crm. I'm leveraging it to do any number of different things, whether it's analyzing, you know, the quality of certain marketing channels, um, based on which sales are being or which leads are being driven to sale or whether I'm generating lists for win back campaigns are trying to figure out a when age leads. So I think that the, like what we talk about a lot, just simply the idea from a crm perspective, from a sales perspective that we try to educate people on is that like my philosophy and I know yours is vr is like sales:

Speaker 3:

8:56

and marketing. It's the same team. It's just different parts of the funnel. Like there's no, there should be no disconnect between the two. Everyone's job is working together to get someone to obviously to close what you know, whether that's like buying a t shirt or, or buying an agency engagement, like whatever it's going to be there. There shouldn't be connectivity between those two teams. And like, I was so excited to talk about this because it's strange to me that even in the quote unquote 21st century like these teams are still built in silos. Um, and, and we talk to people all the time like, well, I don't know, like my marketing people aren't going to be in the crm and Milo is. My question is why wouldn't they be. I mean, if you want them to provide you with a quality lead, like then they better understand how the leads are being worked and now we're going to go over all this stuff together. But it's not about. I don't necessarily have anything specific necessarily. I mean I have lots of tiny specific things, but just the overall idea that sales and marketing is somehow different or, or mutually exclusive as a better way to put that. I find to be silly. Yeah, I think:

Speaker 1:

9:57

so. So often there's this hard handoff, you know, it's like, hey, we do all this stuff to drive traffic and then hopefully that converts into a lead and then we literally just dump it off and then hope for the best. And I think, you know, for marketing, and that should kind of give us some pause because we don't want to hand it off in a, in a bad way. I mean that's kind of our customer. Um, I know in the, not to drift too, too far off topic, but I think some of the best lead generators, uh, in, in the marketplace often are our lead providers. People that generate leads and then sell those leads. This is really popular in the financial services market, particularly mortgage market and I've spent a lot of time in that area and to the point of I'm really wanting that marketing and sales collaboration to be tight.:

Speaker 1:

10:47

Uh, companies that are kind of main liners in that industry like lending tree, um, have always felt like that lead is their customer and when they hand it off, they want to ensure that that sales experience is top notch. And so they've gone to the point of they do net promoter scores, um, for their clients. They have sort of a little bit of A. I think this is pretty intense. I'm a filtering process for the actual sales teams. You think they would want to sell leads to whoever, but they actually do a fair amount of work to make sure that the companies they bring on are working with their best practices and sales. And so that Kinda gives me another example of, of maybe where were our marketing departments should be more like that. When we hand that off, we should be making sure that the sales team is equipped to, to deliver a good experience. So, so let's go to some of the specifics there. Um, um, what are some of the things that marketing and sales should kind of be working on together in your opinion? Um, and get into some of those details?:

Speaker 3:

11:54

Yeah, so I mean, I think one of the most important things that they can work on together is like, when I say when I say this, I don't mean it needs to be super specific, but obviously it's like target persona, like who's more, more, more than likely to buy it. That starts at the top of the funnel today. By the way, when you're talking about digital marketing, like some people say target persona and assume that you're talking about like, oh, were they named them and give them an age. Like, Oh, I'm talking about Rachel and she's a 28 year old millennial. And like, no, that's not what I mean, you know, by target persona. But it could be job role, it could be any number of different things. But the first step is just having both teams understanding like who they're trying to capture and then working together on, on that.:

Speaker 3:

12:38

I mean I think that's one of the most critical things because just like you said, like often the marketing team like drops in a lead to the sales team and then because it's so siloed, they just kind of like hope for the best and the most common conversation whether in a, in an agency scenario or even internal scenario that it's often have between marketing and sales is know marketing is looking at top of the funnel analytics like your Google analytics or whatever else and seeing that they're driving, you know, let's say this month we drove 150 leads. But then on the back end of the sales team comes back and the sales director says, well we only closed two of them. Right. You know? And so, but marketing circle, I don't know what you're talking about. Like they're coming from keywords that matter and whatever else.:

Speaker 3:

13:15

And so when those two teams don't collaborate, they tend to blame each other for the failure as opposed to them being one team where then you could have an open and honest conversation about maybe it's the quality of the leads, okay, let's test that. Or maybe it's the, you know, the poor or, you know, quality of our sales process. Like maybe we're not closing them properly and you can test that. And so what I'd really like about my role at nutshell is as a startup and I get to see across the entire ecosystem because I'm responsible for both. Nobody takes offense when I asked the question, like maybe it's our sales process or maybe it's the quality of the lead because I'm technically responsible for both. So it puts me in the unique position to be critical of myself, which is not being critical at all.:

Speaker 3:

13:56

But it's just analyzing data and understanding, you know, the full spectrum of your funnel. So I would start there with like, the relationship cannot be antagonizing, you know, just because, you know, if sales comes to you and says your leads are crappy, they're not, you know, they're not insulting your work, they're just telling you that the leads that are coming through are poor. Or if marketing feels very strongly that like, no, I, I think that these leads are of a certain quality. They're coming from ad words. These are key words of a business value or whatever the case might be. I think we need to look at our sales process. They're not being critical of the salespeople themselves. They're just, it's, you have to step away and everyone has to look at it as like an inorganic thing. It's not, you know, is that personally? Yeah. And I think that's, I mean like with any. We've talked about this before, whenever you're kind of doing any sort of inner, um, you know, kind of discipline or getting two different groups together or business units are getting to play together. It all goes back to building that trust over, you know, over:

Speaker 1:

14:52

time and, and, and helping to build that trust is, I mean, you talked about personas and just maybe getting on the same page and defining things in similar ways. We get questions all the time when we say, Hey, we delivered, you know, as, as a marketing team, hey, we delivered x amount of leads and the first question we always get is like, oh, well how do you define a lead or what is the lead? And so some of those personas and, and some of those, um, that documentation or discussion that you're having, it's just kind of getting you guys to all speak the same language, you know, in both departments and really defining what those things are so that then you can have a discussion is like, Hey, we gave you 25 leads. We're using the same definition across departments and so we can all agree on, on whether one, we could immediately agree that the numbers, right?:

Speaker 1:

15:38

Um, and that's where kind of bringing analytics together. And then if we can agree that the numbers are right, then we can have a discussion about how to make the numbers better. Right. So, so I think that's another thing that I think kind of helps bring trust and is really kind of an easy place to start because I think in most cases, um, organizations will definitely start a silos. This is simply improving the sales collateral, so marketing are full of creatives and that sort of thing. And, and sales I think often feels like they're on their own when they have to deliver stuff to the client. Because I mean the number one objective or objection always on a sales call is like, yeah, just send me something. Right. And just trying to enable the sales team with stuff that just looks good, right? And it makes them feel confident when they deliver this information or making them feel confident that they have a library that can answer most any question.:

Speaker 1:

16:29

Then that's where the personas, I think we, you know, we don't use personas as much as it used to be really kind of popular thing and even marketing doesn't use them probably as much as we as we should and that's a kind of a whole nother topic. But um, but if you have those personas defined and you have those situations defined, then it's really easy to build some collateral to support your sales team. Can you say, Hey, you're gonna you're gonna run into this customer, you're gonna run into this, this type of customer. You're gonna run into this, you know, this person or this organization and you can kind of figure out like the five or six things in particular that you can kind of offer up and, and, uh, start the conversation with sales on getting the inverse of that vr. I think marketing misses an opportunity often. Look, you know, as a marketer, you don't talk to the customers ever.:

Speaker 1:

17:16

Like you just don't have that interaction. And that's all your sales folks do every day. Like they are on the phone or emailing or whatever. Text messaging doesn't matter. They're interacting with your customer base on a regular basis and to create a positive feedback loop where even if it's only anecdotal, like, so a lot of people say, well, you know, you don't have a certain volume of metrics to be able to determine that. Like your salespeople are gonna be able to tell you what are the common objective. So if you want to create a better lead by the way, you know, the interesting information that you can pull out of the conversations your sales team would having a top of the funnel, you can start to build content or content experiences or ads or whatever else that speak to some of the end of those early objections or solve those early pain points that you wouldn't necessarily hear.:

Speaker 1:

18:00

Um, and so you've got to mind your sales team for messaging opportunities. Um, so I think it goes, there's like two ways or the opportunity to miss there in that sense, which is, as a creative individual, sometimes you're wondering like, well, how am I going to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace? And your customers will tell you exactly how you do that. If you're just willing and you have at least some kind of feedback mechanism to, to hear it, I think it's super important. Yeah. And I think he kind of brought up an interesting point there about, you know, sales to listen to customers all day long and marketing, uh, you know, we're trying to kind of elicit that emotional response, but we don't, we don't talk to a lot of customers. We don't hear the voice of the customer. Um, again, that's the thing that we talk about a lot in marketing, but we usually don't really kind of actually hear the voice of the customer.:

Speaker 1:

18:48

And so, um, so I wanted to give you an opportunity to plug nutshell. Um, I just started my own trial so we're kind of evaluating nutshell internally. So that's kind of a fun experience. Oh, well, welcome. Welcome to nutshell. And so one of the first things that I kind of saw that kind of goes right to this conversation is, you know, typically marketing people are terrified of talking to customers on the phone, right? Even even some salespeople are terrified of actually talking on the phone, but um, but sharing that information or even sometimes marketing feels uncomfortable just kind of sitting over the shoulder of a salesperson and listening, but you guys have, uh, the ability to record calls and I think recorded calls or something when I was leading a sales team, um, that is something we used over and over again for sales training, but you can, you can kind of take some of those clips, um, and probably deliver them to your marketing department and say, Hey, here's an example of a, of an objection that we ran into.:

Speaker 1:

19:47

I don't have something for this. Can you help me with this or can you help me, um, you know, build a marketing campaign, a head of I'm making this sales qualified so I don't have to compete with this objection. I'm totally. So that recorded call as is that used a lot or how do you, is there a way for you to see kind of how clients are using that? I think it a huge feature. Yes. So, um, you know, so it is used probably not as frequently as it should click to call is used quite frequently. Um, obviously be on a call right out of nutshell, you know, you can just click a phone number and do that or integrate with like a ringcentral or kick see or you know, a voip provider if you have something that's already set up. So you get the calls coming in. Um, the way that we use it internally and nutshells we've got a slack channel that we call it mad props. Um, and the mad props channel is like an aggregation of either emails or messages of any kind of verbal feedback or recorded calls. Um, you know, talking about like either:

Speaker 3:

20:48

an excellent support experience like with our support team or sometimes what, you know on the marketing side we get back by the way is like excellent feedback on, you know, a blog article that we just put together like a, you know, a piece of content that we just published like um, you know, top 20 btb cold sales emails, templates. Like we put out this piece of content the other day and we give it to the support team and they share it with people and that feedback comes back. So you know, to your point though, I think the most valuable thing, and we've talked about this in our product roadmap meeting the other day, but, and I brought this up here because I thought it was such a great idea, is the ability for a sales manager to like tag a good call and then share it with the team is both a way to keep your sales team inspired and a way to educate your marketing team on the types of conversations that they want to have and like the ideal way that it should go. And also to your point as a training tool, I mean it's, it's indispensable as a, as a trigger. Yeah. I:

Speaker 1:

21:44

know. I, um, you know, we use another product. We're using close io dot right now and I'm on that. It has the recorded call, but one of the things that we've run into, and it's interesting that you guys were working on, on, on kind of solving this problem is if you do have a large sales team, it's really tough for you to kind of go through, um, you know, all of that and kind of find the mad prop opportunities and so to have the ability to tag it or even a sales person to say, hey, that was a great call, I'm going to tag that, let my sales manager listen to it and pull out something important I think is a critical feature because you, you have, it's with anything though, you know, with software, you have all this amazing data and information in there.:

Speaker 1:

22:30

It's just figuring out how to like, you know, like you said, tag it and be able to, to leverage it going forward. I think it's huge. So that's super important. So not to drift too far off of kind of other things that the sales and marketing should be working on. Another big one, a, and this is probably our number one client request, um, that we're getting right now is people are starting to realize, or maybe they already knew, but it's just becoming an important, um, at this point, but there are, there are so much gold I'm sitting inside of your crm and, and most because again, the sales team doesn't really think like this, you know, have kind of the longterm nature of things. Their frenetic there. They're great in the moment. Um, they're, they're great. I just wrote a blog article today and shark week's coming up, so I had to use a shark week analogy and it's basically said sales are really good at attacking live bait and the marketing team is really good at chumming, right?:

Speaker 1:

23:30

And so, and so what happens, I think a lot of time with crms, as you aggregate, you've acquired all of these prospects in there, uh, but the sales team's really good at attacking so, so they're always attacking, attacking, attacking, attacking, and such a high percentage of the actual people in that crm have shown interest and they want to hear from your, you know, your particular organization for whatever solutions you offer, but for whatever, a whole variety of reasons, they're not in a position to actually be in the decision moment yet though. But then marketing doesn't. The marketing's off like thinking about new stuff in marketing is not really in the crm, a building out lead nurturing campaigns to continue the chumming process, if you will, against probably your easiest targets. Right? And so, um, so that's something that we're building out, um, for several clients right now is that lead nurturing program.:

Speaker 1:

24:28

And so literally going into their crm, a segment routing those, uh, those individuals in a good way so that we know we're talking to them about because a lot of our organizations have sort of multiple solutions to solve multiple pain points. And so doing a good job of segmenting, um, and then talking to and building out campaigns so that we can talk to those, uh, those prospects for a long period of time. I mean, we're talking years until they get to the point where they're either in a place where they can influence the pain has become significant enough or maybe they even transitioned to another organization where they have more influence on the decision and can buy from us. And so I think lead nurturing is a, is a huge opportunity. Um,:

Speaker 3:

25:13

yeah, I couldn't agree more and the other day in an internal meeting, um, you know, there's so many priorities like competing priorities of course. And like just as a thought exercise, I was, you know, we were talking about, you know, we're working from a marketing perspective on different channels and, you know, fine tuning channels or whatever else. But uh, I asked because I'm new at the company, I said when was the last time we did nature leads campaign? They don't, they don't call them, they call them win back campaigns. That nutshell. But, um, so once I went back and I said, yeah, whatever you want to call it. But yes. Um, and the answer was, well, I don't know, I don't really know. It was awhile ago. And I said, well, how many, how many age leads do you think we have in the system?:

Speaker 3:

25:50

And to your point, uh, and I, I read your article and then I commented on your linkedin posts, you know, there's gold in them there. Yes. Uh, so I extra, like I exported out of nutshell, you know, all of our age leads just over the last, like six months, which is not even that far back. Right. And when you think about someone buying crm, it happens a lot. So when people come and try it, then they get distracted internally, particularly on the small business side. And then they kind of let it go and they go back to what they are familiar with, working off a spreadsheet and then they just kind of forget about it and you know, there's 20,000 leads sitting in there, right? That's 20,000 people that I don't have to make an argument as to why they should be interested in nutshell. They already were. And every single marketer, to your point in your article has that opportunity just sitting in their sales, you know, in their, in their crm, whether it's salesforce or. I mean it's just,:

Speaker 1:

26:44

it just sitting there waiting for you to go ahead and create a campaign. And the funny thing is is that when I think about the behaviors of salespeople and how they leverage crm, often they're doing like, whether it's prospecting or maybe you're just trying to get in touch with, you know, with another cohort of leads like they haven't talked to in a long time. They're doing like a bulk email out of their crm. Which is a great way to leverage that type of software. But to your point, like the salesperson is not ideally suited to send an email to 20,000 people. It's not too different, you know, and a, you just can't send one either by the way like it. And to your point, that's where your marketing team comes in, which is like say, Hey, I found, you know, 5,000 leads by the way in my particular pipeline that kind of went cold at x stage and, and you know, in a good crm, you should be able to see what stage they went cold in or like when they closed.:

Speaker 1:

27:35

Um, when I say closed, I don't mean you won them. I mean they closed closed mouth because. Yeah, nonresponsive and then you know, and then that gives the market or just enough information to be like, oh, I've got a great idea and how we can like leverage, you know, six, six email nurture campaign over the next eight weeks. Um, and then we'll see what we get out of it and then they can run the test. And to your point, again, like your salesperson is really not ideally suited to do that. And I think that salespeople would be surprised at how excited their marketing team would be if they brought those kinds of things to them. Like they'd be more than happy to jump in and be like, oh, I'd love to build that campaign. It sounds fantastic. Well, I think think about like all the little pockets that hold those kind of age leads or opportunities or, or just opportunities in general.:

Speaker 1:

28:27

So just kind of a personal story that I went through. So, um, I guess two days ago I had somebody reach out to me through linkedin and they kind of get it out there for awhile. I've been publishing a little bit more on linkedin and so they reached out and, and we ended up having a phone conversation. And again, it was somebody from kind of my past and some things that we had done a long time ago, but I hadn't been good and kind of bad at this. I'm trying to improve this, but just kind of reaching out to people that we had good relationships between where they moved or where we took the business and the kind of thing. So we've just kind of not kept up with each other, right? So anyway, long story short, have this conversation get on the phone. We find out that basically our paths have kind of crisscrossed and a couple of different places, um, over the past years.:

Speaker 1:

29:17

Um, and we've, we ended up talking about like three or four other people that we knew, um, collectively. And so as a result of that one, we had a good conversation about what they're doing and kind of what I'm doing. And so that always helps because then those were additional mouth pieces and we had a good relationship. Um, and then like I said, you mentioned like three other people that I could potentially reach out to because they're kind of in a place where, um, where they may need a marketing agency. And so, so that particular conversation essentially generated three more opportunities and all of that to go to say that, that I realized like, holy cow, like I'm, I'm kind of trying to acquire these new targets and I've got linkedin filled with years worth of relationships that are just sitting there that in Linkedin is really bad at this and I don't have sales navigator.:

Speaker 1:

30:10

So maybe that's their solution and they make this hard, but there's no real. Yeah, there's no way to go kind of in there and figure out who I should be talking to. So anyway, I went through and you can actually now export all of your, all your data out of Linkedin or your connections that has email. It doesn't have phone number of course. So it's what they've provided. Um, so a lot of them are. I did notice when I did that exercise or personal emails and that will probably create a little bit of a challenge. But, but anyway, again, so I exported all those things and realize they have nearly 2000, uh, you know, readymade leads, like people that know me, that we've worked together. We've had a relationship over time and I just need to reach out and kind of reconnect or say hey, how you doing?:

Speaker 1:

30:56

It doesn't even have to be, I don't need to overtly prospect them, but just touching base with them. And so those are in the process of going into a nutshell. We're going to build, I'm going to build some campaigns around that and just looking at. I can't. It's so funny. Like, I mean just because again, these are like, you know, 20 years worth of professional relationships or however long linkedin's been around and I'm looking at the titles and I'm like, oh, the people that I always want to talk to or marketing directors, cmos, ceos if I can. And I'm looking through this list of 2000 people in like almost all of them have some sort of equivalent title. So I'm like, here I am trying to figure out sources of new leads that get me up to that cmo or CEO level. And I got all these people that are my age that are at a c suite now, you know?:

Speaker 1:

31:42

And it's like, oh crap. So anyway, there's a fruit tip for you if you're looking for a good source to prospect, um, you know, if you've been at all diligent and Linkedin, um, there's probably just a mountain of gold inside of. There was actually a really cool tool. So nutshell is part of cahoots, which is like a, you know, sort of a coworking and tech startup, you know, I'll call it community in Ann Arbor, which is pretty neat. That was a really cool article and venture beat. Just kind of talking about the connection between DVP cahoots and a couple of other places like the massive return of investment in the tech startup community in Michigan and why Michigan is one of the sort of like, burgeoning startup communities in America. I think I saw it get through it, but I did see it come up. But the. But anyway, another one of the companies is called trove, which I think you would really love in this regard, which takes. So the idea behind it is just like those:

Speaker 3:

32:40

relationships. I love clever tools and ideas like that. So they're the premise of the tool essentially is that you have all these relationships inside of your organization, just kind of like linkedin that you, that you don't know. So if you're on a sales team or even a large sales team and there's 25 to 50 people on that sales team or something and a prospect comes across your desk, just like you're describing, chances are somebody you know, knows them. Um, so what trove does is like analyze those relationships across all of your company's email conversations, like the history of all the email of all the people just like linkedin would. And then it tells you, be like, oh, did you know that John Knows Sally? And they talked and you know, not too long ago you should ask him to introduce you or whatever else. So it's like linkedin for your email and based only on the relationships that exist for the people that work inside.:

Speaker 1:

33:37

And this was several years ago when copy where it was kind of a bigger organization, but we worked with their sales team to, to kind of generate these kinds of opportunities. And it was, it was funny as we worked closely with that sales team and it was a big, I mean it was a global sales team, so it was just like, you know, several hundred, maybe a thousand or so salespeople. And what they were doing is whenever they would get it, they would go into Linkedin, they were trying to connect with all their sales team on linkedin. So they were kind of using linkedin like that. So they would go in with a prospect, the prospect and figure out if any of their relationships, which were, they were trying to get connected with all their, you know, all the, the whole salesforce at compuware to see if anybody else knew them. Um, and there were a couple deals kind of one that way, but it was really hard to do. And so, so this trove sounds super interesting because that's powerful.:

Speaker 3:

34:30

Yeah. I think we forget we are from time to time that like the world's not as big as you're in an industry. Right? We all know when you. Yeah. When you work in an industry like you're going to end up, you know, like you said, over a 20 year career and I'm not quite there yet, but unfortunately or fortunately I'm heading towards a good time on this side timeframe. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That's good. That's good. I'm glad I'm not so far off that we got three, three years left in my 30 so I'm going to soak them up for what they're worth. But uh, but yeah, I mean it's not, that's when I go to Linkedin, I'm always kind of impressed when I meet a new person by the way and I'll all of a sudden I'll see like, oh, you know, six people that know this person and I'm like, what's, how's that even possible. And it's the, you know, the seven know six degrees of separation thing. Like there's only six degrees that separate you in every single human being on the planet that, that particular concept. And when you look at Linkedin or your relationships, it's probably even shorter than that. It's probably, you know, you're never more than three people removed from I think the other day I saw that, you know, obviously I know you, but I'm not, I'm not more than two people or even one person removed from like the CEO of quicken. Right.:

Speaker 1:

35:39

Okay. Um, so yeah, and leveraging those relationships are totally the same thing though. I was looking at a, somebody that was trying, I was trying to prospect into this company and Financial Services Company. I found a guy who turned out to be a Air Force Academy Grad, which obviously is an interesting immediate link or whatever. And then it turns out he actually lives in the same and probably he was stationed there or whatever. He lives in Vacaville, which is where I live when I was stationed at Travis Air Force Base. So, so right there we have like two, you know, points of conversation to even start the call, like shared experiences. So, so it's not even just the people, it's even just getting into that profile and really understanding the person you're getting ready to talk to and having a couple of just like, you know, gee gus off topic things to or shared experiences to start the conversation.:

Speaker 1:

36:31

So, um, so anyway, do more of that. The last thing and yeah, because we're getting a little bit long. The last thing I wanted to talk about it because I think this is really important and really the only way to kind of build that trust and build deep integration between these two teams is that just smashing up the cultures, right? Um, because they usually are very different kinds of cultures. I mean, you go into sales, so if you could walk on the speaker to quicken loans, I got a lot of familiarity with that. You walk on the sales floor of quicken loans. It's like, it feels like pandemonium boiling energy, but it doesn't, you know, it's, it's Kinda, it can really be intimidating, especially for a marketing department who's probably pretty creative, but it's fairly probably calm and maybe a little more analytical and it's definitely quieter on their side of the building, so to speak, but figuring out ways to create a smashup so those cultures or activities or you guys can get together and understand and trust each other and um, and sort of bleed over, back and forth.:

Speaker 1:

37:33

So I think culture is always a big thing when you're trying to get teams to work together as is getting some common ground, uh, when you're talking about what those core values that make up culture. Right? So, yeah, I think the, I think the way to do that too, by the way is um, you know, I'll, I'll, I won't do this all the time, but I'll take yet another, another opportunity to plug nutshells. So we just launched a slack integration, which is really neat. And so one of the things that you can do to, like bring from a culture perspective, I think the sales and the marketing teams together is that so often sales teams celebrate the clothes, right? Like the actual dollars, the revenue that was generated from that conversation. I closed this deal, it was worth x amount, ring a bell, you know, all that kind of stuff. Um, and then, but marketing and never gets to be a part of that victory, um, which, which sucks by the way because we're not for the marketing team like that lead never comes in. Right? So, so I think one of the things that we've been doing with our, with the slack integration is that:

Speaker 3:

38:37

follow this out logically is that we've got a channel just called sales winds. And like anytime that, you know, a lead over for us over like $200 or something because not shell is very affordably priced comes in and like it rings a bell and like plays and noise and everyone gets excited about it and you kind of pile onto slack and, and take a look at that. But the way to logically extend that out between your sales team and your marketing team is if you're tracking the campaigns that generated the lead itself, then they can look back and look at the campaign and be like, hey man, that you know, that crm for small business campaign or like that, you know, whenever that clever facebook ad that you put together as like, that drove that sale. That was awesome. Let's keep doing stuff like that.:

Speaker 3:

39:16

So I think if they, there's needs to be a shared, a shared victory lap when when a, when a deal is closed and, and by the way like your marketing people, you'll find at least I've found because I haven't had this experience previously, it's really fun to watch and be a part of the sales team, you know, taking those victory laps, closing that deal, ringing that bell and knowing that you played a significant role in it as opposed to just looking at numbers on a spreadsheet, which is usually what, how marketing analyzes revenue. Right? Like, well, I don't know, we ran all these ad words campaigns the last quarter and here's how much revenue is generated and we connect it to whatever and it's all just like numeric exercise. Uh, and for salespeople it's a very personal thing because they get to close each one of those deals.:

Speaker 3:

39:56

So for the marketers out there, go down to the sales floor and like, you know, experience that have fun with it, you know, it'd be a part of it, um, and the energy and the motivation high. So super important. Okay. So, um, so anyway, that's kind of, I mean we'll probably talk about that more because, you know, if you're, if you're doing marketing at the end of the day, you're trying to generate a sale. So we're going to probably talk about this topic in little slices of detail over time, but let's kind of close out the general thing and as we close out, is there anything in particular that's kind of a top of mind? I mean, we normally talk about challenges, trends and maybe recommendations. Uh, anything in particular that's kind of on the top of your radar is. Yeah, so I mean, I'll tell a sort of a real quick kind of funny story.:

Speaker 3:

40:44

Um, so in addition to, you know, to doing being a marketer and now technically a salesperson, which has been an interesting transition for me, obviously I write on the side not nearly as much as I should just be our nose by the way. And I signed up for a, like a fiction, like a flash fiction contest this past weekend. Um, is this is not a story about fiction by the way. And so I was very excited and we had our board meeting on Thursday and I presented to the board and all went well. And then on Friday I woke up and month over month our sales were down like, I dunno, 20 percent, not uncommon on a single day when you know it's a Friday and whatever else, not a big deal. By noon they were down 30 percent by 4:00 they were down 38 percent on Saturday morning they were down 48 percent and by Saturday at like 1130 minute by minute, uh, we were down through the weekend.:

Speaker 3:

41:37

Yeah. But like, but over the month it just seemed odd to me that we will be down anyway. What ended up being 52 percent month over month, which is like, like I just had that meeting with the board and so. So anyway, the rabbit hole I went down and was like this data rabbit hole of like trying to figure out what was causing that particular of disparity in our sales numbers. And so the lesson I learned, I suppose after all this things are fine now and we're still a little down month over month, but I've, there was no clear answer I guess is my point. So as we live in a data driven universe like now where everything is measurable and you're expected to measure and know, like the exact reason for why things happen, just remember that you're still dealing with human behavior. So. So when I had to go and talk to our leadership team about this, they're like, well, what do you think is going on?:

Speaker 3:

42:28

I'm like, I hate to say this like this, but it's July. The fourth of July came at a weird time this week and our leads closed on like a two week lag. So I was like, I don't know. It just people are not paying attention. It's an anomaly. It's okay to to lean on the fact that it's an anomaly. Do not be drowned in the numbers. Numbers are important. Numbers can help you make good decisions that can help you identify what to scale. They can help you identify like what is truly wrong, but if you're going to run tests and do those kinds of things. I think one of the things that I was reminded of this past week is that a true test, by the way, statistically significant that if you let it go like four to six weeks, like that's the timeframe at the minimum, depending on how much traffic and volume you're doing, of course to be able to run that test. And most people can't run a week long test because you're not Amazon. So, um, so that's, that's just kind of like a reminder for everybody that's like be patient, let the numbers play out a little bit and, and don't be so immediate with like making snap decisions. Because of course there were all these suggestions on all these things we should do in each one of those suggestions would have disrupted a current test I was running. Um, and so I had the on our closest:

Speaker 1:

43:44

or to the, the, the answer then you think. I mean, um, I've talked to several different people and no, we're slow because summertime we are, you know, just historically slow during the summer because people are on vacations. Nobody's making decisions. Um, you just can't get enough people together in your collective organizations in order to make a decision to kind of pull the trigger on things. Um, I think small businesses, they tend to be smaller organizations anyway, so if one person's out you've probably lost the decision maker. And so I think that's a, I think that's a real thing. I, I, like I said, I've been talking to a lot of people, didn't do an a fair amount of prospecting myself and I just sent out over the last couple weeks, you know, sending out quite a few emails to those folks and I would say at least at least a third of the responses that I'm getting are out of office messages for vacations, you know, I mean, so it's a real thing and so it's definitely a real thing. So.:

Speaker 3:

44:41

Oh yeah,:

Speaker 1:

44:42

you're making me feel better already here.:

Speaker 3:

44:44

So I missed my fiction. You have to write the flash story anyway just to go public, but it's not, shouldn't do that:

Speaker 1:

44:51

a fiction.:

Speaker 3:

44:55

Oh, that's not a bad idea. Yeah, it was like, so they give you like a scenario. So I had to write a story that was a crime caper that took place on it,:

Speaker 1:

45:02

tugboat and involved in water leads and. All right. Okay. So here's, here's mine. This is coming to a new kind of like focus. I'm thinking about all kinds of ways to kind of just generate awareness around all of the great things that Kaleida Kudos and one of the things that I've always loved doing and I think I can integrate it as part of the sales and marketing effort that we're doing here is just teaching, you know, all the things that we learn. So I love speaking, haven't done a lot of that in a long time. Um, I love doing this podcast is given me a great way to kind of just teach out things and talk through things that I think will be helpful for people. And I love that. I'd love to just be helpful if I could get away with just a, just teaching and helping people without having to charge for it.:

Speaker 1:

45:48

That'd be awesome. But anyway, one of the ways that I'm thinking about adding to kind of that energy is the whole blogging thing. Um, and so you had talked a few weeks back about, you know, making video content and how, you know, video is super important, um, to what most organizations should be doing but aren't. Um, so I'm, I'm working through some ideas of how to kind of make video production on our end, fairly affordable, feel natural, um, be able to feel more like a conversation between us and the clients because relationships are you liking me as a person is really important in what we do as an agency. And in particular for us, one of the things that I think the blogging I'm sort of approach will be really helpful as is most of our clients, uh, because of the nature of digital marketing and digital marketing agency, we don't sit face to face, right? But they'll get a better feel for like who I am as a person, what I look like and kind of what I do on a daily basis. And um, anyway, so that's one of the things that we're kind of focused on and we'll see how this, this comes off, but um, we're definitely going to try it. So:

Speaker 3:

47:02

I love it. I love it. I think the most important thing to remember not only for you and you know this better than anybody, right? Like for two things, one is the whole document, once you do, don't create content. Like, I mean, you know what I mean, like just if you just pay attention to what you're doing and just make it a documentation part of it, you always taught me that, that like that's the type of content that people really love to consume. Um, and that too don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I mean no one is expecting single piece of video content to be this highly produced shot in four K, you know, production. It's just not, it's not necessary. Um, and you've always been, you've always been good at it, at tempering. Even my need to like have everything be perfect and whatever else.:

Speaker 3:

47:46

When we're doing video together at Kalydeco, like you know, I want things to be beautiful at all times and like that's just not necessary and it doesn't mean it can't be good and it can't look good, but it just doesn't mean it needs to be valuable. I mean that's, that's the key. People are looking for ways to become better at what they do and you have a lot of knowledge to share it, so I very much look forward to seeing what comes of this general experiment. The other thing I would say, which I think you and I are learning even with this podcast, right, is that when you go out and read articles about marketing in general, it's always these growth hacking stuff and like, look at this hockey stick growth I've received and you know, even for us, you just got to stick with it.:

Speaker 3:

48:23

It's not gonna happen overnight. Nothing ever happens overnight unless your dropbox and not even dropbox happened overnight. So I think the reminder for people and for you and for me it's like, no, if you think you've got a good idea and you've got something valuable to share and you like the channel and you have fun doing it, then just keep doing it and it will, it will grow over time. The one recommendation I would make, um, for somebody that I think is doing this really well would be, and it's this kind of like highly produced, so I think they've grown in sophistication over time but is the drift youtube channel. So like not, not only is drift a cool tool which is like an automated chat Bot and some actually combines that with like a, you know, the ability to do the fast paced thing right where you can kind of see who's live on your website, where they're from and it takes clearbit data and then fills in the gaps on how big their company is and all that kind of jazz. But, but drifts. Marketing, VP, I think his name is Dave or whatever it. He's been driving their youtube channel for some time and it's fun. I mean, it's a lot of fun. They do all sorts of different kinds of content. So as you're putting this together bar, I want to go check it out:

Speaker 1:

49:27

who they are. We'll take a look at their channel. So one of the persons that have been looking at watching forever and we'll never probably, I don't know who knows what might happen, but we won't get to the level of Gary Vaynerchuk, but obviously he's got a great way of doing that sort of video content. Of course he's got a whole team around him now. But uh, but my current mentor, and you should check them out because I love him. He's got tons of energy's super smart. Um, and, and he's a professional guy. He actually reminds me a little bit of Andy Madeline who used to run our video department. Um, it's just got a passion for video and he's doing blogging and he's really good about sort of talking to, to how he does it and, and really motivating. So he's my current mentor. I liked, I liked the aesthetic of kind of what he's doing, like the fact that he's, he tells, he tells you like, Hey, here's my rig, which is, you know, crazy.:

Speaker 1:

50:20

He's a professional videographer and stuff, but he says you don't need this. And he kind of shows where he started and how he started out some different things. So, um, anyway, so Peter Mckinnon a good shout out to him. He's, he's my current mentor for, uh, for blogging. So we'll see how, how well I do so. Oh, cool. Yeah, yeah. We actually put both of the linkedin or whatever we talk about as far as people to look at, um, in the show notes. So I'll get that out to you. So, all right, with that, we're going to wrap up. We went super long, almost an hour. We're going to have to figure out how to chop that up. But anyway, so anyway, I always good talking to you, Mike. Everybody out there, we love you. Be in an audience. Um, tell your friends about it, encouraged them, send the link around.:

Speaker 1:

51:02

So, so again, like we love teaching and given away the things that we know so that you get better with your marketing, particularly your digital marketing. So share this around, give us some feedback, give us five stars, thumbs up, wherever you're looking at this rate as high as you can and will help more people. Yeah, send us a challenge. Send us a challenge to send us a challenge in the middle and I will solve your problem. You. So yeah, if you've got something you're working on, noodle and on, let us know about it and we'll, we'll talk about it on the podcast and we won't give away any of your secrets. I never really worried about that anyway. But um, but anyway, if you, if you think it's a secret, you're doing something that nobody else has done one, I'll tell you, you're not in to, we'll do our best to help you. It's kind of funny. I'm not going to drift into this.:

Speaker 4:

51:50

The patterns are the same. Um, and so a lot of the same frameworks work over and over again. So. But it's. So if you're working on something that's challenging you, I'm Tossa to us and maybe we'll throw a little different perspective that helps you solve the problem. So everyone we're out.:

Speaker 5:

52:06

Nice.:

Speaker 2:

52:11

Thanks for listening to collide because make the logo bigger podcast. Leave your comments and reviews wherever you download your podcast. Find us on the web at [inaudible] dot com. K A l e I d I c o.com.: